1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of emergency mass notification systems, more particularly, to a mobile alerting system using distributed mass notification delivery.
2. Description of the Related Art
Organizations face many threats which may affect their operation and the safety and security of their facilities and personnel. There is a growth of use of Emergency Mass Notification Systems (EMNS) by many organizations and on different levels, e.g., from a national, state, local to corporate and organization levels. Emergency Mass Notification systems allow authorized personnel to trigger alerts that are sent to large number of targeted recipients via a variety of communication methods, including electronic mail (email), short messaging system (SMS), voice phone alerts, computer screens, sirens, digital displays and others. EMNS can also provide detailed delivery and response tracking, and provide aggregated results via reports.
Conventional EMNS solutions are typically implemented in one of two ways: a Software as a Service (SaaS) EMNS system and an “on-premise” EMNS system. The SaaS system is hosted by a commercial hosting facility, which maintains all data repositories (users, contact details, alerting scenarios, etc.), and offers its functionality over the web, using data communication methods like voice phone alerts, email, SMS and others. An “on-premise” EMNS system is installed in a customer site, behind the firewall of the customer site and keeps all data local to the customer network. These systems are often connected to local delivery and communication systems (such as telephony exchange (PBX), email gateways, networked computers, etc.), offering communication capabilities (such as phone dialing, email delivery, desktop pop-ups on computers, etc) to targeted recipients.
When customer data is sensitive (for example, in government agencies and US Department of Defense), the customer usually chooses for the second solution architecture (i.e., “on-premise” EMNS system). The common conventional deployment architecture is an on-premise EMNS, residing on customer site or data center behind the customer firewall. However, a fully hosted system model is not acceptable in these cases because of data sensitivity or classification.
The conventional on-premise EMNS faces many challenges for efficiently delivering an alert to a large number of recipients via a variety of communication methods. For example, one challenge faced by the on-premise EMNS occurs when, due to major disasters that require evacuation of the facility or major local failures, the on-premise EMNS becomes not accessible or not available. Most common available solution is reverting to fully hosted alternatives, which (as described above) are not acceptable due to data sensitivity. There is no solution as of today to bridge this gap without compromising data sensitivity, or without reverting to use of limited local communication means (such as phone lines) in an alternate location. This limitation prevents a solution to provide large scale notification services based on sensitive information in emergency situation when a local failure or disaster occurs.